Solaris still sorta open, but OpenSolaris distro is dead

An internal Oracle memo that leaked last week reveals that the sun is setting …

An internal Oracle memo that was released last week provides a detailed summary of the company's plans for the Solaris operating system, which Oracle obtained when it acquired Sun. The memo offers a mix of good and bad news for Solaris enthusiasts. It reveals that Oracle is strongly committed to advancing the Solaris platform and intends to increase the availability of resources for Solaris development. The bad news is that Oracle plans to discontinue Sun's community-centric OpenSolaris distribution.

The OpenSolaris project emerged in 2007 with the aim of producing a downloadable distribution that includes a complete computing environment built around the open source components of the Solaris operating system. Sun brought in Debian founder Ian Murdock to orchestrate the endeavor in collaboration with contributors from the Solaris enthusiast community.

Murdock believed that a downloadable desktop-oriented distribution would help to build mindshare around Solaris technologies and attract more interest in the platform. He cited Ubuntu as an inspiration and said that some top OpenSolaris priorities included usability, ease of installation, and cultivating a package repository with a broad selection of third-party software.

Although the OpenSolaris project never really had the potential to deliver a practical mainstream desktop platform, it arguably succeeded in producing a compelling workstation environment for developers and system administrators. Due to the ease with which it could be installed, it significantly lowered the barrier to entry for technology enthusiasts who wanted to try out unique Solaris capabilities such as ZFS and DTrace.

According to the memo, Oracle does not intend to release any future version of OpenSolaris. The company plans to migrate existing corporate OpenSolaris users to an upcoming Solaris 11 Express binary distribution that will be made available prior to the official launch of Solaris 11.

"All of Oracle's efforts on binary distributions of Solaris technology will be focused on Solaris 11. We will not release any other binary distributions, such as nightly or bi-weekly builds of Solaris binaries, or an OpenSolaris 2010.05 or later distribution," the memo says. "We will determine a simple, cost-effective means of getting enterprise users of prior OpenSolaris binary releases to migrate to S11 Express."

Although OpenSolaris is headed for the chopping block and Oracle will no longer be developing Solaris in an open and inclusive manner, Oracle does not intend to close the platform. The existing open source Solaris code will continue to be made available under Sun's open source Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). Most of the new code will also be published under the CDDL—but only after the official stable release and possibly with significant omissions.

"We will not remove the CDDL from any files in Solaris to which it already applies, and new source code files that are created will follow the current policy regarding applying the CDDL," the memo says. "We will distribute updates to approved CDDL or other open source-licensed code following full releases of our enterprise Solaris operating system. In this manner, new technology innovations will show up in our releases before anywhere else. We will no longer distribute source code for the entirety of the Solaris operating system in real-time while it is developed, on a nightly basis."

The termination of OpenSolaris is disappointing for community contributors who have invested considerable time and effort improving the technology. It's also going to be frustrating for third-party vendors that build their own technology on top of OpenSolaris. Independent contributor Steven Stallion, who published the memo in his blog, is clearly unhappy with Oracle's decision.

"This is a terrible sendoff for countless hours of work [building] quality software which will now ship as an Oracle product that we (the original authors) can no longer obtain on an unrestricted basis," Stallion wrote. "I can only maintain that the software we worked on was for the betterment of all, not for any one company's bottom line. This is truly a perversion of the open source spirit."

The silver lining for Solaris enthusiasts is that the operating system will remain strong and most of the components will still be made available as open source eventually, albeit without any community involvement. The absence of the OpenSolaris 2010.05 release created a lot of crippling uncertainty about the future of the project. Now that the memo has provided clear confirmation that OpenSolaris is dead, former contributors and other stakeholders can move on. It's likely that some will move to community-driven projects such as Illumos that seek to develop independent open source Solaris distributions.

I have the suspicion that this will backfire eventually on Oracle; it will create a strong fear of abandonment of those working on MySQL, for example. For many Open Solaris users, I would expect they'll forgo the step to Solaris 11 Express, and finally transition to Linux; that's bad for those who wanted Oracle to be a driver of new *nix technology in the space.

OTOH, it will probably cause some companies, such as IBM, to double down on their Linux bets.....

well at least its still going to be released for free. i used opensolaris for a few weeks last year and it was really cool though it didn't offer anything that i couldn't get in debian. with the btrfs file system linux pretty much has all the features as opensolaris and more (hardware compatibility, larger software choices, etc.)

This is all kinds of bad for the Solaris operating system. I use both but prefer Solaris. That said the Linux form of distributing the software is worlds superior. Download the ISO, verify the hash and bam, you're off to the races. As opposed to to laboring through a ton of different forms and license requirements, to get Sun to send you disks. For many folks, killing their OpenSolaris distro, is akin to removing themselves from Google's indexing; it's like willing yourself out of existence. Dumb.

Now's the time to put the money where the mouth is. I've always heard that FOSS routed around obstacles like these by forking. Is Illumos going to do it? Just look at what happened to MySQL.

I expect that it will route around it by ignoring Solaris in future. Essentially Oracle seems hell bent on marginalizing their Solaris operating system. Oh, it won't happen overnight, but is seems to me to be the start continuance of a long slow decline.

Oracle's plans, while repulsive to most people, make sense as a business decision. They really have zero reason to want to entice people to come to Solaris from other OSes based on the merits of the OS alone. Unlike Sun, they actually fully own other very widely used software. Sun may have bought MySQL and Open Office, but they did so long after both were released as GPL software; the genie was out of the bottle, and even if Sun had decided to close the future source and make it only available on Solaris, the userbase at large would just fork it and ignore their idiotic move.

Oracle, on the other hand, doesn't release their cash cows under such terms. Their DB and other enterprise code is theirs alone, to do with as they please. They actually could make all future versions only run on their Solaris builds, or only have the best features on it. And their customers would either have to find another software supplier or move to Solaris. I doubt they'll do this, but even if they don't, they still don't have any real incentive to make Solaris better for everyone; all they really need to care about is making Solaris better for themselves and their software.

Thus at first, I was a bit sad about the death of Open Solaris. Then I realized the important thing in all of this: the utter lack of anything from Open Solaris of late was due to uncertainty about Oracle's future commitment to the effort. Now that their hand is open for all to see, projects like Illumos can actually make progress in getting people onboard with the fork. And since the CDDL has an explicit patent grant, they should be in the clear to continue using and improving things. (Doesn't mean Oracle couldn't sue people anyway; even if they lose, suits cost money for both parties, and Oracle is made of money.)

Are there any commitments on how quickly they will release the open source stuff, or will it be several version back, when nobody really cares anymore?

It's not totally obvious, but the way that it's explained in the memo makes it sound like the source code will be published shortly after the official stable release. They say that Solaris 11 will go stable in 2011, so I assume that everything new that they create now will remain closed until then. The impression that I get is that they don't want to close development, they just don't want to allow competitors to see how new features are implemented until those features are included in an official stable release.

This is sad news, but far from surprising. What's of the largest concern to me is whether or whether not Oracle will continue to release ZFS source code, since this assists the FreeBSD developers with their own ZFS port/implementation. And don't let anyone fool you, btrfs is years (maybe even a whole decade) behind ZFS in terms of available features, whereas the FreeBSD ZFS port is more like a year or two behind the Solaris implementation.

On the other hand, there's alot of other interesting Solaris technology that doesn't have viable ports to other OSes and it's a shame that Oracle thinks they can achieve greater returns by ignoring the unix enthusiast community than engaging with it. But who knows, maybe the hacker community will make some progress with Solaris forks.

I really worry about OpenOffice. We should be prepared to face a closed-then-open release strategy for StarOffice, with OpenOffice binaries and source code being released after StarOffice release. Oracle will try to monetize StarOffice, and I doubt the Linux desktop has any serious alternative to OpenOffice, or to Microsoft Office.

On the OpenSolaris boards, even after months of complete silence, people kept saying that Oracle was going forward with OpenSolaris development, don't worry, blah blah blah. Anyone who talked about forking the project were shouted down and treated like trolls.

OpenSolaris is absolutely the best platform on which to create a home server — It's been completely bullet proof. I've had mine up for a year without a single disk error.

Even for those who never used OpenSolaris, this is a moment worth reflection. Osol is in its own class of Unix performance, capability, and reliability in an accessible distribution, and there's no getting around that. Whether it's better or worse than Linux is beside the point; it's a rare exotic breed, advanced in a number of categories over competitors, and for what it was able to do and for the community that grew to support it, it was and remains unequaled. This callous, dispassionate excommunication by its new corporate-world custodian may have been inevitable, but it is no less shameful. Wrong thing to do? Maybe, maybe not... and soon enough, it really won't matter. Sad just the same? Without a doubt.

As when Apple killed the clones and ended Power Computing, as when Commodore let Amiga slip through its fingers, Oracle has now relegated a milestone of accessible advanced operating system technologies to the sidelines of progress.

Of course, we'll move on. Industrious supporters will make what they can of a fork. Other platforms will re-implement these advancements. Eventually all this will be eclipsed by something even greater. But today, we can say a great operating system has come and gone, having made great strides for the general community, yet cut well short of its promise. Years from now, when our beards are a little more gray, we'll remember it fondly.

Oracle's plans, while repulsive to most people, make sense as a business decision.

As a short term business decision, I might agree, but in the longer run, I think not. For example, Netscape couldn't compete against IE, but Mozilla/Firefox can. NeXTstep couldn't compete, but Darwin can. StarOffice couldn't really compete, but OpenOffice... oh, crud.

Oracle, on the other hand, doesn't release their cash cows under such terms. Their DB and other enterprise code is theirs alone, to do with as they please. They actually could make all future versions only run on their Solaris builds, or only have the best features on it. And their customers would either have to find another software supplier or move to Solaris. I doubt they'll do this, but even if they don't, they still don't have any real incentive to make Solaris better for everyone; all they really need to care about is making Solaris better for themselves and their software.

In Oracle 11gR2 they introduced a feature called "Flash Cache" which allows you to use a flash based device (ie SSD drive) as a secondary buffer cache. It originally required using their exadata systems but they released a patch so that it would work without. Of course, the requirement is that you run the database under either their Enterprise Linux product, or Solaris.

I happen to have two X25-E's in the machine currently hosting the redo log and just recently upgraded to 11.2. The feature would be nice to use, but since I'm running CentOS 5:

ORA-00439: feature not enabled: Server Flash Cache

Looks like I'll be switching to OEL (hrmph, just like you suggested their customers would ;-)

One comment I saw from a community contributor to OpenSolaris is that he's now locked out of code he wrote, and any further evolutions of that code, until Oracle bothers to release it, well after the point when the binaries ship.

Are there any commitments on how quickly they will release the open source stuff, or will it be several version back, when nobody really cares anymore?

It's not totally obvious, but the way that it's explained in the memo makes it sound like the source code will be published shortly after the official stable release. They say that Solaris 11 will go stable in 2011, so I assume that everything new that they create now will remain closed until then. The impression that I get is that they don't want to close development, they just don't want to allow competitors to see how new features are implemented until those features are included in an official stable release.

First off, it's not official policy - no one knows for certain if this memo is valid...

If it is, the language is painfully vague and leaves so many doors open. Will ZFS and DTrace become Solaris-only features? Who knows.

Does it kind of sound like this in a nutshell?

-No more outside contributors-Source is released for the current pay version minus secret sauce shortly after each binary release, but there's no definite timeframe-That source will have stuff removed from it that's deemed proprietary-The source is at the same version as the commercial binary distribution (?)-We don't know what bits will get removed - the same stuff that's always been removed, or will they pull ZFS, DTrace and anything else other projects (public or private) want?

Thankfully I think enough has already flown out the barn door that all the projects that have pulled in ZFS or other nifty bits (I think DTrace has been finished on FreeBSD and MacOS for some time) that those projects can now continue with or without Oracle. I believe that the current source available even contains the beginnings of dedup, but I'm not really sure that's a huge deal with the way drive prices keep falling.

Anyhow, anyone wishing to still play with ZFS, download FreeBSD 8.1, stick it on VirtualBox or VMWare, and create 10 or 12 virtual drives to play with. It's an entertaining exercise - even if you're not getting the raw speed running virtualized like that, all the features are there and you can see what happens when you "yank" a drive or write a bunch of garbage onto one of the disk images.

As a Solaris fan boy I would sooner see Oracle close source the product, inject lots of cash into it and make money off it than for it to wither on the vine through neglect because of the lack of being able to monetise it. The only real reason I saw for it being open source was for the ability of out sider contributors to address some of the deficiencies in the operating system rather than necessarily to create some sort of love fest - and if Oracle did turn around and continue developing it with maybe the strings attached in the form of licence costs for non-commercial or developer use then it is a small price to pay.

Its of no use to competition if the competition lacks the resources to take product development to the next level - and no customer is going to give a shit if you have skinny pencil necked geek jumping around with arms flailing in the airs screaming about the virtues of open source. Customers want results not ideological jingoisms that add nothing to the bottom line; whether it is open source, closed source or tomato sauce, people want stability, security and reliability - how that is achieved, like the manufacturing of a sausage, no one wants to look as long as it tastes nice - that is all that matters.

Good work, Oracle. First Java and now Solaris. I am sure Open Office will follow. At least we don't have to wonder anymore.

for that we don't need to worry .unlike opensolaris , openoffice is not sponsored by sun/oracle alone but also by Other major corporate contributors include Novell, Red Hat, RedFlag CH2000, IBM, Google and others.

Larry Ellison owns Oracle. Oracle bought Sun. Don't sound so surprised when stuff like this is happening to Java & Solaris. Larry will do whatever he can to milk money from anything under his thumb. My prediction is that they'll eventually "kill" Solaris, and just merge it with their every-bloating Oracle "everything", calling it like "Oracle OS", and then layering everything else Oracle on top of it. I mean, Oracle already encompasses its own partition manager and other crap...things that are usually a sysadmin's domain. Larry just wants everything "Oracle"-based ... MySQL and Solaris don't fit into that picture unless they're "killed" and re-worked to be part of the Oracle farm.

Oracle has already added non-open non-free "connectors" and has hidden the GPL from view on its Oracle Open Office purchase page...

that is not openoffice.org . that is star office rename. you can see oracle evil intention in here that oracle try to confuse people . the original openoffice is without space in between while oracle open office with space in between. but with this openoffice.org can't sue oracle for trademark infringement.

"This is a terrible sendoff for countless hours of work [building] quality software which will now ship as an Oracle product that we (the original authors) can no longer obtain on an unrestricted basis," Stallion wrote. "I can only maintain that the software we worked on was for the betterment of all, not for any one company's bottom line. This is truly a perversion of the open source spirit."

While I understand the frustration of this guy, it´s really and always been a matter of "Read the darn license that you publish your work under BEFORE you publish your work."

Had he chosen to contribute to a GPL´ed body of work / project, he wouldn´t have had such a rude awakening.

Oracle has already added non-open non-free "connectors" and has hidden the GPL from view on its Oracle Open Office purchase page...

that is not openoffice.org . that is star office rename. you can see oracle evil intention in here that oracle try to confuse people . the original openoffice is without space in between while oracle open office with space in between. but with this openoffice.org can't sue oracle for trademark infringement.

Thanks for the info... makes me feel much better about OO... however, still no warm fuzzy for Oracle... Is it the variant of Java that allowed Sun and now Oracle to "brand" OpenOffice? If so, perhaps a painfully complex but necessary step might be to move to a fully unencumbered Java --- if one exists...

Yeah, OpenOffice.org is still free and Free, and developed in an official capacity by more than just Sun/Oracle. Let them keep StarOffice. On the other hand, they've already screwed people depending on the ODF-plugin for older versions of MS Office: under Sun this Office plugin was gratis, now it's $90 per installation and only available for volume licensing. For schools or smaller businesses that may have used it because they didn't want to upgrade to the latest Office release, they now face the prospect of a minimum $9,000 pricetag for the plugin. While I think there's a lot more Oracle could be doing to live up to the hype some Chicken Littles have been generating since the Sun buyout, by gum they ain't standing still either. There's definitely a chilling effect going on, we'll just have to wait and see how significant it turns out to be.

If it is, the language is painfully vague and leaves so many doors open. Will ZFS and DTrace become Solaris-only features? Who knows.

I seriously doubt it, in the case of ZFS - it's mainstream in FreeBSD now, and an awful lot of people have gotten THOROUGHLY used to having it there. I dunno about the future of Illumos or any other "full-OS fork" of the old OpenSolaris code, but I expect a community of OSS devs will cluster around ZFS-on-FreeBSD no matter what Oracle does now.

I wouldn't be entirely surprised to eventually see FreeBSD end up being the premier platform to host ZFS filesystems under, with Oracle backporting more code from FreeBSD's implementation of ZFS than the other way around. It will be interesting to see how that plays out.

What a joke, with this & their attempt to sue Google for the java component at android's core... Oracle have lost all credibility in my mind & should never have a right to leverage the OSS community. This should never be forgotten, and they should never be allowed to benefit again.